YouTube Offers Experimental Opt-In HTML5 Video 265
bonch writes "YouTube is now offering the experimental option to view all YouTube videos using HTML5 in H.264 format. Supported browsers are Chrome, Safari, and the ChromeFrame plug-in for Internet Explorer. Captions, ads, and annotations aren't yet supported but are coming soon."
Re:Should be a selling feature... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, you could sign into an account on YouTube and turn them off.
Re:Should be a selling feature... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Should be a selling feature... (Score:4, Informative)
The three most annoying features of YouTube won't display? Where do I sign?
Captions? They are opt-in, and they can be very useful for hard of hearing people (if the video creators do add them, that is...)
Agreed on the others, though.
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Hmm (Score:3, Informative)
Most video chipsets these days are including hardware support for H264 decoding. This includes the chipsets in devices like mobile phones, MP3 (portable media) players, and set-top boxes.
Re:Should be a selling feature... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, you could sign into an account on YouTube and turn them off.
And let them track how many cute, fluffy kitten videos I watch? Er, I mean how many boob videos I watch? And car crashes. And explosions! People falling off skateboards. Grr, manly videos! That's right. Anyway, I think not.
No. Firefox is Ogg/Theora + Vorbis only (Score:5, Informative)
No. Firefox video tag is free formats only. Tools like mplayer are a cesspool of security holes— they aren't designed to be exposed to hostile content. The video tag requires pretty deep browser integration, ... only apple supports using the native infrastructure and even they disable 99% of their features for security reasons (e.g. try a mov with hyperlinks in it).
Mozilla is committed to an open web, and you can't get their with a wink and a nod and asking users to install codec software which is illegal everywhere in the developed world. (Including europe. I'm so tired of seeing people characterized codec licensing as a US thing— there are more European patents on codecs than US patents)
Re:Well, that kind of sucks (Score:3, Informative)
H.264 is the codec used in youtube when you play videos with the flash player. This HTML5 video viewer just reuses theses videos, only the html client code changes. Using other codec means reencoding all their videos in a different video format, which must not be easy. Specially when the alternatives are worse (theora) or not ready (dirac).
Works great in my side by side comparison (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Should be a selling feature... (Score:2, Informative)
I though the OP was referring to the crappy popup that video publishers can pepper YouTube videos with "LOLOLOLOLOLOL TEH NXT BIT IZ TEH PHAT!!!!!"
Fud fud fud fud (Score:2, Informative)
Theorarm [wss.co.uk] decodes Theora full screen video at about 110 FPS on my jailbroken iphone. The hardware support thing for h264 is mostly an issue because of h264's utterly obscene cpu consumption, Theora is much more thrifty. The "doesn't work" thing is entirely manufactured by the device makers (e.g. Apple) having a direct monetary interest on a format that they get royalties for being adopted.
Mozilla doesn't just refuse. Legal licensing of the codec would be 10% of their annual budget. Do you really want 10% of Mozilla's budget to just be flushed on a single media codec? (and then more needed for AAC.). For that kind of money Mozilla could employ an entire codec development team.
Re:Hmm (Score:3, Informative)
No one huh? [dailymotion.com]
Re:Now all we need... (Score:4, Informative)
> and ffmpeg being free and with H.264 support
Free in what sense? You can use their code in your code. Your code would then not be able to be distributed to users unless you pay the relevant patent licensing fees. The Mozilla Corporation could do that, but then any other Firefox distributors (e.g. Linux distributions) would not be able to distribute Firefox without either removing this functionality or paying the relevant patent licensing fees. Anyone doing a custom build of Firefox and distributing it could be sued by MPEG-LA to recover the money due them.
Effectively, Firefox stops being "free" for practical intents and purposes. It's still "open source", but the only thing you can really do is contribute patches back to the main repository, unless you pay up the patent fees.
That's not exactly a desirable situation. We might end up there, but as a first cut trying to avoid it is a good thing.
Re:I wouldn't want a HTML5 only Web now (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah I tried that. I had to move back down to 10.0 because while the performance was better, videos looked like crap because hey, guess what, 10.1 doesn't have nice-looking video scaling! I'm sorry, but I'd rather have Flash eat my CPU alive than feel like gouging my eyes out due to uneven pixelation.
--- Mr. DOS
Re:What about firefox (ogg video)? (Score:5, Informative)
Why throw around bullshit claims based on nothing more than your vague and absurd assertion that "every time you hear..."? You can easily search for that info yourself, which would take less time than it took to post to slashdot. For example, you have this purely subjective analysis [osnews.com] which was done by encoding Theora and h.264 files with equivalent size and then having a dude claim what image he preferred. Although he claimed that h.264 was better according to his own personal tastes, you can easily see for yourself that, when comparing Theora and h.264, you get pratically the same quality with the same file size. It's the same bandwidth, same size, practically (and in some cases) indistinguishable quality and although Theora's developers had to intentionally avoid more efficient algorithms due to patents.
So who exactly is spewing those bullshit, FUD claims of "Theora needs triple storage capacity and wastes twice as much bandwidth"?
Re:Should be a selling feature... (Score:3, Informative)
It's not just a matter of money. It's a matter of Firefox not being able to be redistributed by downstream distributors unless they _also_ buy the license. As in, it would effectively stop being free software in the "can modify and redistribute" sense.
Re:Mod parent troll (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Informative)
Old technology? Since when is technology's age any relevant to it's value? Electricity was discovered centuries ago and we still rely on it up to this day. Do you believe that just because it's old technology it should be simply be abandoned without any relevant and rational reason to justify it?
And for your information, Theora is on par with other formats such as h.264 in all relevant categories such as file size, bandwidth and encoding quality. So, that's also not it.
Regarding that "hardware accelerated" bit, do you know what it takes for a codec do be "hardware accelerated"? It only takes the will of the manufacturer to offer hardware support for a specific format. The h.264 codec isn't magical nor is the Theora codec cursed. In fact there are Theora hardware decoders in the market already [xiph.org].
So please refrain from spewing ignorance and/or FUD. Theora may eventually stumble on relevant shortcomings but hard
Re:Hmm (Score:3, Informative)
Trying out with chromium (binary package) at the moment, does not work, neither do firefox 3.5. :(
"Your browser does not currently recognize any of the video formats available.
Click here to visit our frequently asked questions about HTML5 video."
Re:What about firefox (ogg video)? (Score:5, Informative)
Being a codec snob is trendy.
The reality of it [xiph.org] is much less exciting.
Youtube already supports several versions of the files, they could probably drop the flash 7 compatibility in exchange for Theora. In terms of numbers of client Ogg/Theora for firefox is probably a better deal than flash 7. Adding one more to a half dozen isn't a tripling.
Re:Should be a selling feature... (Score:5, Informative)
Part of the problem is that h264 licensing fees are generally hidden. You don't pay for a license, your hardware/software vendor does. Apple and Microsoft and Google all buy the licenses for you and include them in their products. It's hard to convey the importance of the licenses for non-free codecs if they seem to be free.
Re:h264 being "not open" confuses me... (Score:3, Informative)
From the VLC FAQ:
Is VLC legal in all countries?
Probably not. Specially DeCSS module might violate DMCA (and similar laws) and some codecs would require licenses for personal/commercial use. There haven't been any court cases related to VLC but specially companies should make sure they pay license fees to license holders if they use VLC commercially and use patented formats or codecs.
Essentially the licence is not for implementing the codec, but for using it. If you use VLC to encode video, then broadcast that video (including on the Web), then at least in some countries, you have to pay the patent holders.
Re:It's about time. (Score:3, Informative)
you don't need flashblock, noscript blocks flash just fine. Just tell it to block flash and to apply restrictions to trusted sites as well.
Re:Should be a selling feature... (Score:5, Informative)
That's been seriously considered. The reason it's not being done (yet?) is described at http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2009/06/directshow_and.html [mozillazine.org]
Re:What about firefox (ogg video)? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Should be a selling feature... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Should be a selling feature... (Score:3, Informative)
.Some of us are deaf, and would much rather Youtube caption their videos. You don't HAVE to watch it. That's why it's called CLOSED CAPTIONING. Don't like it? TURN IT OFF.
YouTube has closed captioning? I thought all they had were stupid popup captions that are manually added by video uploaders. Google Voice has quite a bit more training to do before closet captioning is anything like automatic or pervasive on YouTube.
Re:No. Firefox is Ogg/Theora + Vorbis only (Score:1, Informative)
Incorrect.
Codec patents are not "software patents", even though theycan read on a computer running particular software. A "Software patent" is a very specific thing, the fine distinctions of which are mostly interesting to patent attorneys, and mostly not understood by Slashdot users. The best lay description of a software patent that I can come up with is an patent on an abstract idea with no mechanical element at all. Most codec patents, instead, specify particular transformations on data by machines. The patents are granted and enforceable in Europe, and have been widely and aggressively enforced. A random example. [theregister.co.uk]
A typical codec patent is hyper specific-- specify exact bit orderings and exact operations on the bits. Patenting the more abstract behaviours in a codecs would require software patents, which lack the universality (and ease of getting granted) of the more mundane normal patents. This usually makes it trivial to work around most codec patents-- So long as you don't care about bit-stream compatibility. This, in part, explains the near complete lack of litigation of codec developers against each other.
Crappy webcams ? Do they need H264 ?!? (Score:3, Informative)
Well technically yes. Theora produce slightly more blurry frames for an equivalent bitrate.
Now the big question: do we *really* need the added quality of H.264 ?
For fuck's sake, it's Youtube we're speaking about.
The website filled with small home-made video done using crappy webcams. Or feature botched TV-grabs. Where the people who upload video don't actually really have a clue about codecs and thus their creations have been through several conversions, each time with the corresponding drop of quality.
Arguing whether H264 or OGG/Theora is better for streaming HTML5 videos means arguing which codec will be the best to faithfully convey all the artefacts contained in video produced by clueless users. Given the average, both formats are already*good enough*. In fact the older MPEG-4/DivX/Xvid would probably be already good enough.
We're not talking about the best way to bring 1080p commercial movies to Youtube, we're talking about videos of dancing kittens filmed with a smart-phone's embed cam.
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Informative)
As long as Theora isn't implemented in video chipsets, it is irrelevant. I think more people care about decent performance than RMS-approved GNU/Freedom (Free as in beards).
Re:This isn't HTML5 (Score:2, Informative)
I think you misunderstand. The HTML5 standard does not specify a codec to be used in the <video> tag; just like the standards don't specify what image formats are to be used in the <img> tag.
Arguing that "it's not HTML5" because your browser (presumably, firefox) doesn't support h.264 would be no different to an Internet Explorer user saying "it's not HTML4.1" when a website uses PNG images.